Chapter 12

I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been
delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour
consulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the
heavy volumes of the catalogue; and yet to save money for my
afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home to
Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series of shilling books, an
anthology of Irish fairy stories and, for an American publisher, a
two volume selection from the Irish novelists that would be
somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more
than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some
twelve pounds, ('O Mr. E...' said publisher to editor, 'you must
never again pay so much') and for the second, twenty; but I did
not think myself badly paid, for I had chosen the work for my own
purposes.

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of
Ireland the greater part of every year and was but keeping my mind
upon what I knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I believed
that if Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales
(for I knew him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that
he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his
Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock,
their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it
were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern poetry a
breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry. The statues of
Mausolus and Artemisia at the British Museum, private, half animal,
half divine figures, all unlike the Grecian athletes and Egyptian
kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the middle of the
crowd's applause or sit above measuring it out unpersuadable
justice, became to me, now or later, images of an unpremeditated
joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by doubt and
enquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem to
men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our
study of that ruined tomb, raised by a queen to her dead lover, and
finished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors after her death
from grief, or so runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the
handiworks of Scopas and Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once
more an art, where the artist's handiwork would hide as under those
half anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some old Scots ballads
or in some twelfth or thirteenth century Arthurian romance. That
handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own image
upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great pleasure in certain
allusions to the singer's life one finds in old romances and
ballads, and thought his presence there all the